Bleeding London

by Geoff Nicholson

  And maybe this could be explained as part of a simpler desire just to show off, to say look at me, look what I’ve done, what I’ve achieved, aren’t I a fascinating if eccentric character? That made perfect sense.

  Yet he didn’t want to make London his. This would not be anybody’s particular version of London, not Dickens’, not Pepys’, not Betjeman’s, and certainly not his own. Since every street was to be walked down, every street would have equal value and importance. He wouldn’t spend extra time in those streets that were attractive or steeped in history, neither would he dismiss streets that appeared to be featureless or uninteresting. He sensed something profoundly egalitarian in all this, a belief in a sort of democracy, a belief that all places, all things had merit and were to be equally cherished and respected. And perhaps there was a spiritual, maybe Buddhist element in that, a belief that all places were one, but he didn’t want to run too far with that idea or there’d have been no point in setting off at all.

  And yet, convincing though these reasons were, he was not quite convinced by them. His real motives seemed other, and far less reasonable or explicable. In the end he didn’t know why he was going to walk down every street in London. In truth he felt compelled by a force he didn’t understand. It wasn’t logical and he wasn’t sure he really had a choice. It was just something he had to do. The city was mysteriously leading him on, drawing him in; it was a mystery that he relished. Perhaps it had to do with love or sex or self-knowledge, one of the ‘big issues’, but although he was only intermittently eager to understand his own motives, he did genuinely believe that if he walked long enough and far enough he might eventually work out why he was walking at all.

  For the moment it was easier to think about practicalities. Stuart tried to lay down some rules of engagement for himself. His desire to walk down every street in London required him to make some definitions. First there was a need to define exactly what he meant by London. He decided that his London would be synonymous with the London boroughs, although he was aware that this increased the size of his task. The boroughs included outrageously distant areas like Croydon, Bromley, Ruislip. Once these places would have been in, respectively, Surrey, Kent and Middlesex, and even now they remained outside the London postal districts. But what was London if not its boroughs? If you didn’t define London in the broadest possible way, you might as well restrict yourself to walking, say, round the square mile of the City.

  Then he had to decide what he meant by ‘street’. His dictionary defined it as ‘a paved road (esp. Roman): a road lined with houses, broader than a lane.’ He was immediately suspicious of a definition of street that found it necessary to use the word road, but he obviously intended to walk down roads too. He also intended to walk down roads that weren’t necessarily lined with houses. For that matter he intended to walk down lanes too. Alleyways and courtyards, mews and closes, avenues and walks were certainly on his map, as were embankments, bridges and towpaths.

  On the other hand, there were some paved roads where he didn’t intend to walk at all; along stretches of London motorway, for example, through underpasses and road tunnels, along flyovers. Public parks presented another problem. After a lot of thought he decided he would walk around the boundaries of every London park and common, but only go into them where there was what might be construed as a genuine road. So he would walk along Rotten Row in Hyde Park but he wouldn’t be compelled to walk along every path that cut across Hampstead Heath or London Fields or Wimbledon Common.

  In the same way, he felt he wouldn’t need to cover the roads that went through retail or business parks or through industrial estates or which were service roads for factories or warehouses. If roads claimed to be private he was quite prepared to respect their privacy. And, in a rather different way, he would apply much the same rule when it came to council estates; a walkway between two tower blocks could remain untrodden, but a genuine road where cars or milkfloats or dustbin lorries could pass would have to be walked down.

  There was to be nothing macho or Herculean or competitive about his project. He had nothing to prove, and there would be no time limit. He wouldn’t have to cover vast distances in a single day. There would obviously be a certain amount of endurance, patience and determination involved, but it wasn’t to be anything so crude as a simple test of stamina or staying power.

  He decided he would undertake his walk in sections of ten miles per day. That felt like a suitably modest figure. At a brisk pace he would be able to cover that distance in no more than two and a half hours, which would represent a relatively minor intrusion on his day. But perhaps he’d be walking more slowly than that. He wanted to give himself the time and freedom to observe and appreciate his surroundings. He would allow himself to rest if and when he wanted to, and he’d certainly be able to stop for a coffee or even a beer. And if someone tried to engage him in conversation, then he wanted to have time for that too.

  A fitter man might have found ten miles a wholly trivial distance, but for him at his age, with his low level of fitness, ten miles a day seemed on the limit of what was easily achievable, especially since it had to be done day after day. He might have managed to cover twenty-five or thirty miles in a single session but he’d have been crippled the next day. He didn’t want to be crippled, yet he did want to feel the basic physical effort of covering the ground on foot. He wanted to feel the solidity of the pavement. He wanted the slog and the weariness of it.

  He had to make sure this didn’t just turn into gentle strolling and sightseeing, into a series of days out. To that end he decided that he would not be allowed to enter any gallery or museum or tourist attraction. He would be allowed to go into shops only if he had something specific to buy that he needed for his walk: a drink, shoe laces if his current set broke, Elastoplast for his feet perhaps, but he couldn’t enter any shop simply to browse. If it rained or snowed he was entitled to take shelter, but not for more than half an hour; after that he’d have to continue walking, whatever the elements. If he was passing the house of a friend he would not be allowed to call in and break the journey. If he happened to run into somebody he knew and they suggested some social venture, he would have to decline.

  He considered taking a camera with him to photograph the things that caught his eye, to create a visual record and an aide-mémoire, but he decided against it. He feared that the presence of a camera would turn his walking into a photographic expedition, into a quest for the picturesque. Besides, taking photographs would make him conspicuous, and there were all sorts of places where a man with a camera would be unwelcome.

  If he had been homeless and rootless, a street person, it might have been very different, purer in a sense. He could have started walking, continued for as long and as far as he saw fit and then he could have stopped and spent the night wherever he happened to be, then started again the next morning. That way there’d be no crossing the city to get back to base. Not everywhere would be equally hospitable. Doorways in Hampstead or Kensington or Chelsea were not welcoming to the homeless, and on some estates a man sleeping in a doorway might have found himself in all sorts of trouble, but as a methodology this homeless version had a lot going for it. Or perhaps, less dramatically, he could have taken to the streets in a camper van and completed daily circular walks from where it was parked, returned to spend the night, then moved on to a new starting place in the morning, gradually covering the whole city.

  But, of course, he wouldn’t be doing it like that. He had a home to go to, a wife, a job of sorts and, as far as possible, he didn’t want that life interfered with. Each day, using either his car or public transport he would need to travel to a spot from which to begin his walking, and at the end he’d either return home or go to work. He wouldn’t be able to walk at weekends, either. He’d just do it on weekdays as though it were a job. Then there’d be family holidays, Christmas, days when he or Anita might be ill and at home. There might even be days when he was required to do something for The London Walker, t
hough of all possible disruptions this seemed least likely.

  He had no intention of telling Anita what he was doing. She would not have disapproved exactly, not even thought he was mad, but she was an all too practical woman and she would simply have pointed out the immense difficulties he was going to face, the sheer size of the enterprise.

  He was well aware of the vastness of what he was proposing, but at first it was hard to find the exact parameters of that vastness. He spent a lot of time trying to find out just how many miles of road there were in London, but he failed until he consulted an HMSO document called London Facts and Figures. There it all was in black and white, in both miles and kilometres. It told him there were 8,318 miles of road in London, 37 of them motorway, 1,080 of them trunk and principal roads, and the rest were ‘other’. If he walked ten miles a day, fifty miles per week, 2,500 miles per year, he would have covered London in less than three and a half years. That was a daunting task but certainly not an impossible one.

  Then he realized that the 8,318-mile figure assumed he would never have to walk the same street twice and that was clearly not to be. For one thing there were culs-de-sac and dead ends. In order to walk along them at all he’d obviously have to walk along them in both directions. But even without such obvious difficulties the asymmetry of London streets was such that covering an area with a single, continuous walk that never covered the same ground twice was next to impossible. Take the simple case of a set of parallel streets running east to west that connected with streets running north to south at either end, a shape that looked like a ladder. There were such configurations all over London. He looked at his map and immediately found examples in Wimbledon, Battersea and Catford. Say you began walking along the east/west streets; there was no way to get around such a pattern without either missing sections of the north/south streets, or without repeating certain stretches. Given the nature of his enterprise, only the latter was acceptable, which meant he would cover a lot more than the simple mileage of London streets, and the ladder configuration was one of the simplest. As the pattern of streets got more complex, it became even harder to cover efficiently.

  Then, like all cities, London was in flux. Even the most recent maps couldn’t keep up. New building created new roads. By the time he’d completed 8,318 miles of walking there would be a new set of streets that hadn’t been in existence when he’d started. He would have to mop these up at the end.

  He bought a map, an A–Z, but he chose the colour version because it was printed on smooth, unabsorbent paper. He wanted no blodges, no seepage. He also bought a black marker pen, for he intended to draw a thick black line along all the streets he had walked so that the whole map would eventually become black and obliterated, no street names visible, London reduced to an abstract linear design. The map would become increasingly less useful and one day it would be completely useless and meaningless. That would be a very special day, the day when it was all over, but he knew it would be a long time coming.

  The task loomed bigger and bigger, but in a strange way it didn’t matter how big it was, because whatever its exact dimensions it was certainly finite. The task, like London itself, had limits. It was achievable. It was only a matter of time and persistence. There was a goal, an end in sight. For a long time starting seemed like much more of a problem than finishing.

  He knew he had to begin somewhere and he knew that in one sense any place was as good as another, but he scanned the index of his A–Z looking for a street name that sounded appropriate. His eyes fell on a line that read North Pole Road. Next day he went there and started his walk.

  He had no idea what to expect in North Pole Road. He knew there would not be frozen wastes, igloos, polar bears, and yet he couldn’t imagine what a street with this name would be like. It was situated in west London, not far from Notting Hill, not far from White City, very close to Wormwood Scrubs.

  He looked at his A–Z and then at a tube map and he decided he would have to drive there. He parked in a leafy street called St Quintin Avenue. On the corner were three young teenage girls and they had a baby with them. He assumed it belonged to one of them but he couldn’t really tell. They held the baby up as though he were an aeroplane and made him fly through the air at head height, then every now and then one of the girls would pretend to headbutt him. It looked like a form of torture but it was obviously done with affection and the baby didn’t object.

  Stuart made the short walk to North Pole Road. He was glad he hadn’t hoped for too much. It turned out to be an ordinary local high street, with a railway bridge at one end, and a small public garden at the other that served as a traffic island. The street consisted of two parades of shops facing each other: Roger’s Bakery, Mick’s Fish Bar, Jackie’s Flowers, Marion’s Hairdressing, Varishna’s Newsagent, Charig’s Wine Shop. There was a butcher, a greengrocer, a bookmaker’s, a few takeaway food places, a pub called the New North Pole. Everything felt small-scale and decent and unexceptional. It was representative of a certain sort of London, not rich, not poor, not pretty, not ugly, not hostile, not hospitable. He was pleased to have started with somewhere so mundane yet so typical. But try as he might he couldn’t find much to keep him there, so he walked towards Wormwood Scrubs, a place he had never been to before. It was the name both of the gaol and of an area of open land with playing fields. He walked along Ducane Road, past a school and a hospital until he came to the prison.

  In some ways it was much as expected, with forbidding brick walls and towers and barbed wire, but its location was not at all as he’d have pictured it. He somehow felt that prisons would be located in the middle of nowhere, away from people and civilization. Wormwood Scrubs, however, was situated on a main road, on a bus route, near shops and a housing estate and a railway line. The prisoners could probably look out of their cells and see the buses and trains going by. It felt all wrong. The sheer proximity of daily life would be part of the punishment. The high walls meant there was little for him to see, but at one corner of the prison site there was what looked like a house (although surely the gaol didn’t contain workers’ cottages?) and there was a walled garden with a huge rose bush climbing up over the brickwork and escaping.

  He had to go back more or less the way he’d come and as he passed the school he watched some fairly talented schoolboys doing catching practice on the playing field. It was then he realized that this first foray was in danger of turning into an aimless ramble. He pressed on determinedly. It took a long time to walk all the way up Scrubs Lane, past the industrial estates, across the bridges that took him over railway lines and canals, and at last he came to the Harrow Road. He wondered why some roads merited a definite article (the Old Kent Road, the King’s Road, the Edgware Road), while others of apparently equal status and nature (Oxford Street, Essex Road) did not.

  He followed the Harrow Road on its long, eastward course. It was wide and windy and it rattled with traffic. He saw a tyre centre whose frontage had a mural depicting members of staff. He thought about setting foot in Kensal Green Cemetery but he resisted. Further along, nearer town, he left the Harrow Road, and took a footbridge over a canal and headed towards the Trelhck Tower. He thought of Hugh Casson, frightened by Ernö Goldfinger, scared by ‘the degree of certainty compressed into a small room.’

  He found his way to Ladbroke Grove, passed under the Westway where he saw two drunks standing on top of a prefabricated toilet doing some kind of dance. There was also a hairdresser nearby called Have It Off. Then back through the leafier part of Notting Hill, or perhaps it should have been called North Kensington, he wasn’t sure, and he returned to where his car was parked.

  He sat in the driver’s seat feeling both footsore and pleased with himself. He knew his walking could have been more purposeful but he’d done a reasonable ten miles. Not bad for a beginner. He opened his A–Z, took out a marker pen and drew black lines through all the streets he’d walked along that day. When he was finished he tossed the A–Z on to the passenger seat and drove h
ome.

  He knew he should have felt good, yet as he drove he had a profound sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction, and it wasn’t simply because he’d occasionally lacked purpose in his walking. Rather he suspected that something fundamental was wrong with his method. Somehow he couldn’t imagine completing another thousand days like this. Simply scoring out streets after he’d walked along them wasn’t going to be enough. It marked his passage but it didn’t record his presence. Even as he sat there with the day’s walk fresh in his mind, he knew it was already starting to fade away. He could no longer quite picture the prison towers, and he’d forgotten the name of the hairdresser in Ladbroke Grove. Before long the whole day might just as well never have happened. There was nothing to say he’d been there. His experience was disappearing and he knew he had to find a way to reclaim and retain it.

  The solution was obvious enough. In order for his experience to feel real and meaningful it wasn’t going to be enough just to do the walking. And if he didn’t have a captive audience of tourists to whom he could describe what he saw, he realized he was going to have to write about it.

  PLAYERS

  Mick Wilton liked to think of himself as one of nature’s aristocrats. The world obviously saw him as a plebeian, so he had to rely on nature for a second, higher opinion. When it came to cars, suits, women, that sort of thing, he liked to think that he knew quality, even if he didn’t always have enough money to indulge in it. In his fantasies, for instance, he went from one exotic, expensive location to another, in a chauffeur (or, in a better fantasy, chauffeuse) driven Roller, never having to engage with the grime and irritation of the city streets.

  He had decided he would not be travelling again by black cab. He didn’t want to be ripped off by some cockney wag who insisted on broadcasting his views on queers, blacks and women, especially if they weren’t prepared to go to Hackney. You had to admire them for knowing their way round the whole of London, and you had to admire them for even keeping their sanity, given the number of hours they spent negotiating London traffic, but they were still people he didn’t want to deal with.